After much hard work and discussion, 0.3 has arrived. This is an important milestone for us, because it marks the point where we will advertise the project to the wider community. More on that soon. Version 0.3 starts to include some of the important parts of the game, now that the core is complete. Changes/additions include:

Thankyou so much to everyone who has worked towards this release. In leading up to this release we've made some important decisions about the future of this project. One of those changes is that we will be releasing incremental builds/versions every month. This should help the community to test and enjoy changes, and to work with a version that is close to what the developers have.

As mentioned before, we are now happy for you to spread news of this release, and FreeOrion in general, to other news sites, publications, or whatever you please. We are looking in particular for new coders. More information on how you can help will be available on the website, and forums in particular. You can help continue the development of FreeOrion through various ways:
* Programming
* Art
* Music/sounds
* Game Design
* Bug testing

When you report bugs you find in 0.3, please remember that there are three different categories, each with their own place for submitting:
* bugs - these are glitches, crashes, inaccuracies, etc, which are obviously not the way we intended the code to be:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_i ... tid=544942* feature requests - these are improvements to the UI (eg, turn button should be bigger) and other related enhancements (eg, add autosave to options menu). Please use the feature request page to add these:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=54 ... unc=browse* game changes - the game design work is done on our forums, and that is the appropriate place for you to take an active part in the development of the game design. Also important, when you post a bug/feature request, please be sure to check existing and fixed bugs/feature requests to make sure you are not submitting a duplicate. This saves us time leaving more for developing the game. Also include the save game files when reporting a problem, and include it in zip format (gz, tar.gz, etc, are unacceptable).

The next important milestone is space combat. This is a huge area and there will be a lot of discussion and ideas around. This is a good time to remind you that the leaders of this project reserve the right to make a decision about game design. While we try to involve the community as much as possible in the design process, this is not always appropriate or desirable.

Enjoy this release, and I encourage you to help make this a great game.

One thing for all you early adopters to note: The first version of the installer set up the app to run in a window by default. Now it runs in fullscreen by default. So you may or may not want to download it again.

FreeOrion 0.3.1-RC2 has been released. It is a bugfix and UI improvement release. Note that the Windows version requires .NET Framework 2.0. You can get this by running Windows Update, selecting "Custom", then "Optional, Software", then ".NET Framework 2.0". Now get to breakin' it!

I should have mentioned that this release is a development snapshot, and that I'm going to try to make more frequent releases -- about once a month or so. Consider this the February release. Please keep the bug reports coming!

FreeOrion 0.3.1-RC3 has been released. Once again, it is a bugfix and UI improvement release. Most if not all of the server instability that you have seen in RC2 has been fixed, and the turn processing is a lot faster as well. Note that, as before, the Windows version requires .NET Framework 2.0. See the post above about RC2 for details about this.

The new mothly snapshot, FreeOrion 0.3.1-RC4, is available. More bugs have been fixed, and a few small UI improvements are also added.

A version number has been added at the bottom of the intro screen; please note this number when reporting bugs, so we know which version has the bug. The version number will be adjusted in each release.

A note about the RC4 release: if you are installing FO over an existing installation, you may need to delete your config.xml file (if it exists), or you'll get an immediate crash when launching FO. You can find this file at:

RC4 has been re-released. There were a couple of major stability issues; those have been addressed now. Also, the music file has been missing for the past few releases, and it has been replaced now (Artifical_Intelligence_v3.ogg).

RC5 has been released. It represents a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and some more user-noticable stuff too.

- A few more techs, buildings, and graphics associated with techs and buildings have been added.
- It should be a lot faster to load and save games, and to receive new turns from the server. (This is the behind-the-scenes stuff.)
- There is now an indicator that shows up over a system when the cursor is over it, and another indicator over the currently-selected system, if there is one.
- The options window was completely rewritten. It should be more complete now, and should work a little better.
- There are now two modes of running FreeOrion available in the start menu -- full-screen and windowed.
- Numerous bug fixes.

Note that the save file format has completely changed, and so your old files will not work.

The full list of changes is too lengthy to list completely, but some of the notables include:-FMOD is gone! OpenAL is now used for sound, eliminating a non-free dependency.-Several other dependency versions have changed (though this isn't visible to most players).-AI runs on Python. Anyone can edit the script in /default/AI/FreeOrionAI.py without needing to recompile FreeOrion. If interest in this is expressed, I can write up documentation about the interface FO provides for AI, so contact me if you'd like that information.-The production and research screens have been overhauled. The UI is much more customizable now, with movable and resizable windows and more flexible displays of the tree view or the buildable items. As well, queues have icons for their items on them.-The sidepanel is significantly changed, with entirely reworked resource, population and buildings panels.-Building panels on the sidepanel show in-progress and completed buildings.-Specials on a planet are shown below the rotating planet render.-There are tooltips on the sidepanel, in various stages of (in-)completeness, particularly on the resource panel, that provide lots of hopefully-useful information about what's going on to produce the numbers that are displayed. This should help make understanding how the game works much easier.-Meter and resource production estimates on the sidepanel now account for effects much more accurately. There are still some issues with this to be resolved, but results are shown graphically -Much art has been added, including new tech and special icons.-Various bugs have been fixed...

...and likely introduced, so please try out this release and report any at SourceForge.

RC7 has been released for Windows XP. It will probably also work on Windows 2000, and might work on Vista, but hasn't, to my knowledge, been tested on either.

Some new stuff includes:-Many new icons. Yay for art people.-The infamous food bug is fixed! (and various other bugs)-A new initial test ship design screen. You can pick a hull and add parts to it, and the ship will be buildable on the production screen. Naming your design doesn't work properly due to map keyboard accelerators not being disabled on the design screen, though.-An initial test fleet supply distribution route calculation and display system. There are small checkered lines emanating from systems with planets you control over top of starlanes. These can be expanded by researching the Fleet Logistics tech. Enemy fleets block the propegation.-Various UI improvements.

Note that there is a known bug where if a battle destroys an enemy empire, the server might crash. Starting very small galaxies can cause this to happen on or soon after the first turn. With larger galaxies, battle fleets have more space to roam, so are much less likely to run into AI homeworlds and wipe them out...

As usual, please report (other) bugs at SourceForge and feel free to post comments on the forums.

This is mostly a bugfix release; the crash when an AI empire was defeated issue in particular should be fixed. Additionally, the capacity to do Python AI scripting has been significantly increased, should anyone else be interested in working on that.

If you're confused about version numbers, pretend the last few "RC" releases didn't have the RC. Release naming should be more consistent in future.

FreeOrion v0.3.9 has been released for Windows XP and as a mostly-statically-linked binary for Linux.

Changes since the last release include:-A mostly-statically-linked Linux binary is provided that should work on many distributions. See this thread for more information.-Various new and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.)-Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape-Internal details of ship designs, hulls and parts and their interaction with other game features, including how they're defined in text files-Completely reworked design screen. The current version is much closer to the planned design, though is still incomplete. It can be used to design ships by drag-dropping parts after selecting hulls, and to review existing ship designs.-New ship parts-Various Python AI interface improvements-Various minor UI improvements-Various bug fixes-OpenGL 1.5 is now semi-required on Linux. The program might run without it, but this is unsupported. Note that future versions will require GL 2.0 for Windows and Linux.